Weight Loss Lessons - How I Easily Lost 30 Pounds
I remember it clearly. I stepped on the scale, and I saw the number I never thought I would see....it had happened. I was officially at that number. The heaviest I had ever been, and what I knew was my breaking point. I ended up curled up on the bed, crying, while my poor Husband tried to figure out why.
That day, I decided to fix it. I started slowly paying attention to what I was eating. Not really what I was eating, but how much I was eating. I noticed that on a normal Taco Villa run, I would usually get a burrito and a chalupa. The burrito itself filled me up. Why did I order the chalupa? An even better question, is why do I go ahead and eat it, even though I knew I was full?
I started paying attention to that. Not just noticing it, I mean really paying attention to that. I started eating on the smaller plates in our cabinet. Surprisingly, again, smaller portions filled me up. And yet, if I put more food on the plate, I would still eat it.
Then I moved on to only eating when I was hungry. This meant not eating because it was "lunch time". If I wasn't hungry at noon, why was I eating? You see, the myth that you have to eat to keep your metabolism burning, is just that...a myth. Studies have proven that your metabolism doesn't slow down, even after three days of fasting (for more information on this, check out Brad Pilon's Eat Stop Eat). Eating every few hours has nothing to do with it.
Then I discovered intermittent fasting, and became fascinated by it. The Eat Stop Eat philosophy really interested me, and Brad Pilon did an excellent job on the book. If you're interested, I highly recommend it.
I tell you all this, not to make it sound like a walk in the park, because it wasn't. The strange thing is, the hardest part was dealing with ME! Realizing that I didn't have to eat, just because it was time was extremely liberating. I realized that I don't have to think about food all the time. I don't have to spend hours preparing meals and carrying around Tupperware containers and freaking out if I didn't get to eat on schedule. I realized how obsessed I had become with eating! That was not helping me lose weight!
I am now thirty pounds lighter and I have maintained that for almost a year so far with little to no extra effort. Just making a few changes made a HUGE difference! Below are the simply changes I made in my diet that made the biggest differences.
- Eating off the smaller plates. I was shocked at how little it took to fill me up! Then I was shocked at how much more I was eating, just because it was there! No other reason. Holy cow!!
- I gave up Dr. Pepper. I am a caffeine addict, I will admit that. However, after really paying attention to the number of calories in each one, and how much of my workout was spent just making up for that, I switched to Diet Dr. Pepper for my morning caffeine fix. Since then, I have given up my daily Diet Dr. Pepper. I still have one occasionally, but not everyday.
- I started integrating the intermittent fasting into my daily/weekly routine. You can incorporate intermittent fasting in several different ways. Eat Stop Eat calls for one to two 24 hour fasts a week. LeanGains calls for 14-16 hour fasts daily. Fast 5 is another approach that calls for daily 19 hour fasts. You can customize intermittent fasting to meet your lifestyle, and there are a ton of health benefits to fasting. If you're interested in reading the list of benefits, I recommend reading through Eat Stop Eat. The book goes into the different health benefits of the fast and why.
- I started eating, when I was hungry (other than during my fast) and ONLY when I was hungry. No more of this eating just because it's time to eat. How did I get into that habit? What good was it doing me? None. Nothing. Oh wait! It was making me fat!
- I enjoy the foods I love. That's right, I have not cut out any specific food from my diet (other than regular Dr. Pepper, unless I'm somewhere that doesn't carry the diet). I have just started paying attention to how much I eat. Calories out have to be greater than calories in. No way around it. If you want to lose weight, you have to spend more energy each day than you eat. Simple math.
- I logged my daily food intake. I don't do this consistently anymore, but for a while, I logged everything I ate. I was shocked at how many calories I was eating. I didn't even realize how much I "grazed" at work when people brought snacks and all that. Logging the food really opened my eyes to what I was eating.
- I've learned why I eat. Stress. Boredom Frustration. Anger. Being sad. None of these are because I'm hungry! I'm an emotional eater, and I hate that. Now that I know why I eat, I can find other things to keep me busy when I get that urge. Most of us will never know true hunger. Those "pangs" we feel are more than likely, just out of habit or emotional reasons.
Through all of my trial and error, I learned that losing weight really isn't that hard. We make it hard. There is no magic combination of foods, no magic formula. There's no quick fix. Calories out must be greater than calories in. How you make that happen is up to you. Intermittent Fasting is how I make that happen for me.
I hope you have found something in my experience here that can help you. I also hope you can see that getting rid of the fat doesn't have to look like rocket science. Then, it should be easy to maintain your new weight using the same principles that helped get it off.
Haley Estes is an avid believer in Intermittent Fasting, and uses it daily. She is a certified kettlebell instructor and the owner of West Texas Kettlebells http://www.westtexaskettlebells.com. The author grants full reprint rights to this article. You may reprint and electronically distribute this article so long as its contents remain unchanged and the author's byline remains in place. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Haley_Estes By : Haley Estes |
